Stay on target

When this trailer started making the rounds on the internet earlier today, most people reacted with a resounding, “wait, what?” Seriously, even people who have been following this movie’s long, interminable development are shocked that it’s actually coming out. If you’re unfamiliar with this particular film’s journey through development hell, it basically goes like this. James Cameron has wanted to adapt the classic manga Battle Angel Alita forever. First it was an issue of technology, then funding and then he made Avatar. That movie made a boatload of money despite being, you know, not good. But Cameron decided that it should be his life’s work and would dedicate himself to making a whole series of movies about blue aliens. At the time, it seemed like his Alita movie was dead. Then, he handed the project off to director Robert Rodriguez, who is capable of making movies in a reasonable timeframe. Fast-forward to today, and we get this.

Well, we can’t accuse it of not being faithful to its source material. You know, for as many jokes as we’ve all heard about “anime eyes” over the years, I’ve never stopped to consider what they’d look like on something recognizably human. It looks… wrong. That’s not knocking the quality of the CGI either. The whole movie looks pretty spectacular. I love the way they’ve recreated Scrapyard. Alita’s cyborg body, especially when she leaps into action for a fight, looks really cool and well-animated. It’s just those eyes. They don’t fit actress Rose Salazar’s face, and no human in the movie looks like that. In the manga, everyone has giant anime eyes because that’s the style. Here, she’s a strange outlier. Not even the other cyborgs in the trailer have eyes like that.

“Does it bother you,” she asks, “that I’m not completely human?” No, there are tons of not-completely-human people in this trailer. What bothers me is your WEIRD FREAKING EYES WHAT THE HELL, LADY?!

OK. So the plot is reportedly taken from the first four volumes of the 9-book manga series by Yukito Kishiro. Alita is found in The Scrapyard by Dr. Dyson Ido, played by Christoph Waltz. She has no memory of who she is or where she came from. All she knows is that she has insane combat skills. She becomes a mercenary and tries to figure out who made her and where she came from. Weird eyes aside, I’m genuinely excited for this movie. I got way into the manga back in high school, devouring each volume as quickly as I could find it. As most of my manga exposure came from the public library, I experienced Battle Angel: Alita as well as its prequel, Ashen Victor, completely out of order. That didn’t matter. I was enthralled by the cyberpunk world, stylized action sequences and a cyborg story that was more than just a robot rehash of Pinocchio. So far, this movie looks like everything I’d want from a Battle Angel: Alita adaptation. And unlike with this year’s Ghost in the Shell travesty, the people behind it look to have some understanding of the source material. I wonder if that brain-eating cyborg is going to be in this.

Though I think I know how it’s going to end. Alita will find her creator, who will be a pasty white dude surrounded by Fullmetal Alchemist wall scrolls and anime body pillows. That’s the only kind of person I can think of who would design a robot with those CREEPY-ASS EYES.